4086. Robert Southey to Edith May Southey, [15 November 1823]

Endorsement: Robert Southey
MS: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. AL; 1p.
Unpublished.
Dating note: Dating from content. This letter was written on a Sunday after Southey and Edith May arrived in London in November 1823 but before Sunday 22 November, which they spent with Mary Anne Hughes; see Southey to Bertha Southey, 26 November 1823, Letter 4094. The only possible Sunday is 15 November.

Sunday morning

My dear Edith

Will you say to M^rs Hughes that I will reply to her kind note in person the first morning on which I can feel myself fairly free from the desk. Say also that I send Yamoyden

⁽¹⁾

Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip, in Six Cantos (1820). The authors were James Wallis Eastburn (1797–1819) and Robert Charles Sands (1799–1832). Southey’s copy was no. 886 in the sale catalogue of his library.

for M^r Hughes’s

⁽²⁾

John Hughes (1790–1857; DNB), whom Southey was encouraging to write an article for the Quarterly Review on American literature. His review of ‘Washington Irving’s Tales’ finally appeared in Quarterly Review, 31 (March 1825), 473–487, published 11 March 1825.

use, & that when I reach home I will send him what little information I can collect there from my American books & Ticknors letters, concerning American literature.

Your best way to Amen Corner,

⁽³⁾

Thomas Hughes was a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and he and Mary Anne Hughes lived in a house at Amen Corner, just west of St Paul’s.

is by Warwick Lane, which you enter from Newgate Street. The great gates are on a line with Paternoster Row.

Yo el Pa.

⁽⁴⁾

‘I the Pa’.

Notes

1. Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip, in Six Cantos (1820). The authors were James Wallis Eastburn (1797–1819) and Robert Charles Sands (1799–1832). Southey’s copy was no. 886 in the sale catalogue of his library.[back]

2. John Hughes (1790–1857; DNB), whom Southey was encouraging to write an article for the Quarterly Review on American literature. His review of ‘Washington Irving’s Tales’ finally appeared in Quarterly Review, 31 (March 1825), 473–487, published 11 March 1825.[back]

Notes

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven

Lynda Pratt, Ian Packer